Archive for the ‘google’ category

Android may be “open source,” but the Google services including navigation, integrated Gmail, and other things are not. This was made quite clear last year, when Google slapped the leading Android phone modder, Cyanogen, with a cease-and-desist notice for including Google’s proprietary software in his custom builds, which savvy Android users use to circumvent carriers’ crippling of their phones.

And once again for emphasis: this aspect of multitasking isn’t really about running multiple apps at once as occurs in a desktop environment, it’s about leaving them in memory so you can quickly switch between them.

Starting today, Google Chrome and Firefox 3.6 users can drag and drop attachments into Gmail messages without hassling through the slow, kind of annoying manual file upload. Gmail has also increased their support for Google Calendar with a new Invitation feature.

What’s at stake? Nothing less than the future. Microsoft wants computing to continue to be tied to the desktop—three screens and a cloud, as Ballmer is fond of saying. For Apple, it’s all about closed information appliances with lots of third-party apps, computers anybody can use. And for Google, all roads lead to the internet, and the internet is synonymous with Google.

In fact, there are likely more task managers for Android than there are significant games or other non-hobbyist apps. And anyone who has ever perused an Android forum of any kind knows that the top recommended app is TasKiller, not just in the category of utilities for killing background tasks, but across the board. It’s the number one app.

Android users recommend installing TasKiller in the same well meaning way that old Mac users recommend fixing file permissions. Except that installing TasKiller and using it to kill off offending background processes actually makes a big difference in usability to many Android users, which is why it is so popular and so widely recommended.

If you want to understand the current mobile landscape, it’s essential to understand that, in broad terms, what Apple has unveiled for iPhone OS 4 is pretty similar to Android’s multitasking model. In both iPhone OS 4 and Android, users should never need to quit apps manually — when the system runs low on memory, it automatically quits least-recently-used background apps to free up more.

Now, it’s true that there aretask manager apps in the Android Market. But they are not necessary. The Android system doesn’t come with one and doesn’t need one. And I strongly suspect that Google’s Android team is annoyed that these task manager apps are in the market, because their existence creates the impression that they’re necessary or useful. I’ve spent a few weeks on a Nexus One, and background apps don’t slow the system down and don’t need to be quit manually.

One can argue about which platform, Android or iPhone OS 4, has the better multitasking system. Maybe Android’s system is still better; my hunch is that Android allows background apps more freedom. Maybe the iPhone’s system is better; there are some fascinating technical details, like how blocks and Grand Central Dispatch are now available for concurrent and background tasks. (Whatever you think of iPhone OS 4’s multitasking model, don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s simple; this is state of the art computer science.)1 In the end, I suspect opinion on the differences between Android and iPhone multitasking will fall along the same lines of the general question of Android-vs.-iPhone — Android offers a bit more freedom to developers, iPhone is more controlled and orderly, and tries to guarantee a more responsive system for the user.

You certainly do need a task manager on Android for the simple reason that certain types of applications can be battery hogs. They may not tax the performance of the device enough to be killed automatically. I know Android 2.x is supposed to monitor battery usage but it simply doesn’t work very well — or at all in some cases. Subsonic (streaming audio client) kills my phone’s battery if I don’t kill it manually with a task manager. The app does not include a quit option. It can kill my battery in about 3 hours even if I pause playback because it keeps its connection to the server open. Another app I use, Jabiru (jabber client), does the same thing but it does have a disconnect and quit option so I wouldn’t need a third party task manager to deal with it. So it seems to me Android’s multi-tasking is largely dependent on the applications you use.